Siken Richard

Tell me how all this, and love too, will ruin us.

These, our bodies, possessed by light.

Tell me we'll never get used to it.

We're shooting the scene where I swallow your heart and you make me

spit it up again. I swallow your heart and it crawls

right out of my mouth.

but I want it back now, baby.

An all-night barbeque. A dance on the courthouse lawn.

The radio aches a little tune that tells the story of what the night

is thinking. It's thinking of love.

It's thinking of stabbing us to death

and leaving our bodies in a dumpster.

That's a nice touch, stains in the night, whiskey kisses for everyone.

History is a little man in a brown suit

trying to define a room he is outside of.

I know history. There are many names in history

but none of them are ours.

I stare at you like I'm looking through a window,

counting birds.

I touch myself, I dream.

Wearing your clothes or standing in the shower for over an hour, pretending

that this skin is your skin, these hands your hands,

night spilling over them like

gasoline

I’m pulling you out of the burning buildings

and you say I’ll give you anything but you never come through

Your name like detergent in the washing machine.

Your name like two X’s like punched-in eyes,

like a drunk cartoon passed out in the gutter,

your name with two X’s to mark the spots,

to hold the place, to keep the treasure from

becoming ever lost. I’m saying your name

in the grocery store, I’m saying your name on

the bridge at dawn. Your name like an animal

covered with frost, your name like a music that’s

been transposed, a suit of fur, a coat of mud,

a kick in the pants, a lungful of glass, the sails

in wind and the slap of waves on the hull

of a boat that’s sinking to the sound of mermaids

singing songs of love, and the tug of a simple

profound sadness when it sounds so far away.

Here is a map with a your name for a capital,

here is an arrow to prove a point: we laugh

and it pits the world against us, we laugh,

and we’ve got nothing left to lose, and our hearts

turn red, and the river rises like a barn on fire.